Everything begins with a very simple thought and grows into a magnificent premise and returns to a very simple thought…

Keep or Destroy

I confess I do not know anything about growing apples.

Many around me who are more experienced treat the trees differently than I. Carelessly I allow them to do what they do naturally, although others will spray, trim and corral inerrant branches. I will learn soon what to do next, but for the time being I will simply enjoy what I’ve started.

Questions are plenty!

For example, when do I take the apples from the tree? Do I wait for one to fall naturally and then work on taking off the others?

Can I shape the tree so it is easier to mow underneath? Which branches should I remove?

Do I take some of the burgeoning fruit off so that I can assure the remaining fruit gets more nourishment?

What do I do to protect the remaining fruit until harvest?

Like I said, there are many questions.

Encroacher!

So. What do I do about this encroacher? Will it create more problems than not? What is it? A worm of some sort? Or is it simply a fungus growth?? Will it harm other branches? Or other fruit? Do I let it stay, or destroy it?

Questions. Decisions. Right choices. Wrong choices. What’s best?

Pondering the needs of my apple trees this morning and as I wandered the yard with my dogs, I considered the weeds. Many are falling to the onslaught of the weed eater every day. Before much longer they will all be removed so only the choicest of growth will remain. Some of them with thorns or nettle I remove with a whack of a stick, breaking their back so they will not continue growing. Others I will grab with my hands and pull them from the soil…

This brings me to my thought this morning. How do we know what to trim away from our lives, and how do we know what to simply leave alone? Jesus presented a parable about tares growing with the wheat and not separating them until harvest (Matt 13:24-30). These tares came from the enemy who sowed them at night, intermixing the bad seed with the good seed. In his thought you are a victim of your enemies. In earlier verses he warns about sowing seeds where they had no opportunity for success – the wayside where fowls ate them, the stony ground where there was no depth of soil, and thorny ground where their potential good would be choked out.

Some things you have no control over, while other things you can easily control …

The key? You need to know the difference!

Weeds are always with us, but we can control their population with some work while the growth is dormant. Once they blossom and seed then they over produce and it takes a lot of effort to eradicate them! What we cannot easily control are the weeds in our neighbors yard. Like cottonwood fluff their seeds float with the wind and end up wherever the wind takes them – like your yard!

In my area the common nemesis is scotch broom… A beautiful shrub with yellow flowers.

Scotch Broom

As the flowers die, the seed pods burst open and it seems like millions of seeds fly in the wind and are impossible to simply kill off. You can spray them with poison, but unless you get rid of the root system it will simply blossom again. I know. I fight them all the time. I experimented with a rather large bush in the back of my yard. While most of them I will dig up with my tractor and put them in the burn pile, this one bush was sprayed with poison guaranteed to kill to the roots. After about a year, it started growing again.

If you do not control the Scotch Broom it will take over every sunny spot in your yard!

We are responsible for our own lives and cannot control others. We must be accountable to what we produce and make sure we are not producing bad product. So, let’s identify what is bad in our lives and our habits and control so that we produce good. What might be bad, or questionable, let’s work hard on removing the weeds! The Scotch Broom in our lives needs to be controlled else its offspring will spread and take control of everything around us.